Baby dumping on the increase

More and more newborn babies are being abandoned, with up to eight a day being dumped and left to die by desperate mothers without the means to care for them.

‘In Gauteng, for every child we find alive, two die.’

Newborn children by the thousands are being dumped, wrapped in plastic and thrown into the veld, tossed into trash to be delivered to rubbish dumps and disposed of in myriad other ways.

The term for these are “unsafe abandonments” and one in two are estimated to survive, while “safe abandonments” naturally have a much higher success rate.

“In 2010 we estimated 2 500 just from child welfare offices in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban and their regional offices had been safely abandoned,” said Dee Blackie of the department of anthropology at Wits.

“When we researched it with the baby homes in 2016, we estimated the number to be just under 3 000. We looked at how many baby homes there are and private NGOs, but not at the public ones. We felt this would be much higher,” Blackie noted.

“In Gauteng, for every child we find alive, two die.”

The number of unsafe abandonments may never be known.

The 2016 demographic and health survey by the department of health (DoH) found 15% of women aged between 15 and 19 years in South Africa have begun child bearing: 12% have given birth, and another 3% were pregnant with their first child at the time of interview.

“As expected, the proportion of women age 15 to 19 who have begun childbearing rises rapidly with age, from 4% among women age 15 to 28% among women at age 19,” the report stated.

In Blackie’s dissertation “Sad, Bad, and Mad: Exploring child abandonment in South Africa”, she “interviewed mothers who abandoned [safely and unsafely] and there was no clear motivation as to why they chose one alternative over another”.

“Both said they loved their children and viewed themselves as victims. However, the mother who abandons safely is possibly able to see beyond her own predicament to that of her child.”

Tahyya Hassim of New BeginningZ – an NGO focused on vulnerable children – said there was a need for education for desperate mothers-to-be.

“It’s a better option for mother and baby if they approach any organisation working with abandoned babies,” Hassim said.

“A lot of birth mothers complain about the service they receive at clinics and hospitals. Unfortunately the reality is social workers don’t want to make the option of adoption available to them, and ridicule the woman.” –